


Prompt: Off Balance

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [134]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Betrayal, Codependency, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Magic, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Nightmares, Pietro Has Issues, Resurrection, So Many Goddamn Issues, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-20 07:17:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11915883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: This he knows: his sister is gone. He doesn’t know where.This he knows: his parents are dead and have been going on ten years now.This he knows: his powers are strong, the team are his friends, everyone knows something that he does not.This he knows: something is wrong.





	Prompt: Off Balance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nanyoky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nanyoky/gifts).



> So this was written for a prompt for Nanyoky over on tumblr which you can read [here](http://essayofthoughts.tumblr.com/post/164650175395/wanda-eternal-sunshines-herself-from-pietros).
> 
> It may have gotten a little out of control.
> 
> I listened to [_Stare Master_ by General Mumble](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOzHpwIJkoo) and the acoustic version of [Aviators' _Mechanical Instinct_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbzhp8FCUfk) on a loop while writing this.
> 
>  
> 
> please don't hate me.

 

 **i.**  
First there is pain, nothing but blinding pain.

Then, there is nothing.

 

* * *

 

 **ii.** **  
** When he wakes things feel… off.

 

* * *

 

 **iii.**  
They are kind to him, the Avengers. He’s not sure why. Sometimes he catches them whispering, falling silent when he nears. He considers using his speed to listen in, decides against it..

They have been kind. For now, that is enough.

 

* * *

 

 **iv.**  
When he wakes, he is disoriented. Off balance. He leans to his left as though expecting something there - a hand, an arm, a shoulder to bump against. He almost falls several times.

“Psychic weapon,” the Captain tells him. “Of some kind at least. Not much by way of physical damage, but it addled your brains a little. Did something to Clint too, but you saved him from the worst of it.”

Pietro tries to remember. He remembers the city, flying, remembers a flying thing, a gun firing.

Remembers pushing a car to cover the archer. Remembers pain.

Then, nothing.

 

* * *

 

 **v.**  
In his pocket is a picture. It shows him, at about seven years old, his parents, his sister. She’s wearing a red dress and has a serious expression on her face. He tries to remember her name and can’t, not for the life of him. His parents names are not as hard - Erik and Natalya.

He unfolds the picture, folds it back up. Slips it into and out of his pocket. There’s a crease in the middle, a line between him and his sister, between mother and father standing behind them.

He assumes they’re dead. His parents died in the shelling, he remembers that for definite, a shell etched with  _Stark_  scratched into his memory like a scar.

His sister though… he’s not sure. She’s dead, she has to be, or gone at least; he knows he would not keep the picture for no reason. When did his sister die? During the shelling? While they waited to be saved? Or was it after, on the streets, or in some foster home of illness? Might she still live, somewhere far away?

He can’t seem to remember, no matter how hard he tries.

 

* * *

 

 **vi.**  
He goes back to Sokovia, goes to Novi Grad. About a third of the city is intact, another third being repaired. The last third is filled with refugees. He walks down streets and hopes.

Some things feel familiar - a baker calls his name, asks after his health, asks if he’ll return to run deliveries now. At a cafe a woman asks after his sister.

“I don’t know,” he tells her. “I lost her.”

The woman nods, pats his hand sympathetically, looks towards the broken road that leads to the chasm.

She says, “If I see her, I’ll tell you.”

 

* * *

 

 **vii.**  
Pietro does not think she will see her.

 

* * *

 

 **viii.**  
Novi Grad feels odd, empty. A patchwork of familiar and unfamiliar. He can remember cycling down a street, turning a corner and then… nothing. He stares at a street he knows he travelled down and recognises nothing.

“It addled your brains,” Steve reminds him. “We don’t know how. We don’t know if this will ever change.”

He wants it to change. He doesn’t like not knowing.

 

* * *

 

 **ix.**  
He walks streets over and over, night and day. Walks them, jogs them, runs them in all his new speed. Looks at them from every angle. He spends a whole hour picking at a sandwich, staring at the town map, and another in the library, reading books on memory.

He finds a new block of flats where they’d lived before the shelling. It looks almost identical to the old one - run down, broken in, full to bursting with people.

He considers going in, seeing if the layout is the same.

Instead, he walks.

 

* * *

 

 **x.**  
The others are still kind. The Captain smiles sadly at him, offers to play baseball, work off some energy. Stark sits in his lab and tinkers, occasionally emerging with velocity-proofed goggles or clothes that change structure and breathability depending on wind pressure. Rhodes and Sam talk of warzones from the other side; a new perspective. Vision offers small reassuring nods, even knife-sharp Natasha offers her own brand of kindness.

Clint invites him to his house.

 

* * *

 

 **xi.**  
“Without you,” he says, “I wouldn’t be here. They wouldn’t still have me. I wouldn’t see my son born.” Clint’s hand is heavy on Pietro’s shoulder as the archer looks him in the eye. “You’re family now.”

They are not so quietly kind, at the farm.There is no quiet whispering in corners. Cooper and Clint help Laura with the baby and Pietro ends up keeping a sulking Lila occupied. She likes to run across the fields to the trees, climb the trees to a vantage point like her father would and flick stones at him with all the precision expected of Hawkeye’s daughter.

Pietro lets her.

 

* * *

 

 **xii.**  
He wanders Novi Grad so often he starts to walk it in his dreams. As he sleeps he walks the remembered-not-remembered streets, walks to the cusp of the chasm and walks his way through the city’s scarlet ghost.

There is the old church, the big synagogue. A street he remembers protesting on. And then, he emerges from the ghost town to the other end of Novi Grad.

It feels like something is waiting for him, something walking at his side. His memory, maybe, or his sister, or the secret that will end this not-knowing.

He goes down to Stark’s lab.

 

* * *

 

 **xiii.**  
Stark is brusque around him - around everyone. He shows his kindnesses in fits and starts and avoids everyone often. Pietro approves. It means it feels less like Stark knows something he doesn’t. As though, of all of them, Stark has not participated in their whispering circles.

Stark looks up from some welding when he enters. The blowtorch is set down amongst circuitry and metal bolts, three different multitools and a hammer.

“Roadrunner,” he says, peeling off his gloves.

Pietro takes his photo out of his pocket, unfolds it. “You can find people,” he says. “When you are not being Iron man and not being Tony Stark, when you are part of the team but not fighting… you find things.”

Tony looks at him, goggles on his forehead, grime on his face. “Well,” he says. “That’s one way of putting it, I guess.”

Pietro shows him the photo. “My parents are dead,” he says. “This I know. But my  _sister-_  I do not know what happened to her. If she died in the shelling or after it, if we parted ways or if we lost each other, if she died in a protest or the experiments or if she lives on elsewhere.” He looks at Stark, the man looking a little like a rabbit in the path of a car at Pietro speaking more to him in two minutes than he has in two weeks. “I need to know what happened to her. If she died, if she lived. Where she lives or is buried, what parted us. Will you help me?”

 

* * *

 

 **xiv.**  
Stark promises to look for his sister. His fingers are gentle when they take the photograph, set it down on a desk and have FRIDAY scan a copy. 

“I’ll do what I can,” he says, tilting the photograph in his hands. “I can’t promise anything. Sokovia’s organisation is terrible, worse after Utron. Half of the records are still on paper. But I’ll do all I can.”

Pietro accepts this promise and resumes searching for his memories.

 

* * *

 

 **xv.**  
He’s at the graveyard when he finds them.

His parents’ graves, side by side.  _Erik and Natalya Maximoff_  their dates and a passage of Hebrew so chipped it can’t be read anymore.

He stays at the graves for an hour.

 

* * *

 

 **xvi.**  
It’s Stark who pulls him out of it. His phone starts up with some horrific jingling noise and when he hits the button it’s Stark’s voice.

“Roadrunner,” he says. “You in Novi Grad again?”

Pietro does not answer. He knows Tony can track the phone if he needs to.

“There’s a shelter,” he says. “For homeless teens. Records say you and a girl with the same surname stayed there a few times.”

Pietro’s mouth is dry. “Is she there-”

“Now? No, I don’t think so. But someone there may know where she went.”

 

* * *

 

 **xvii.**  
The shelter is one Pietro has walked by and never spotted before. He does not recognise the boarded up front, the battered doors, the sign proclaiming it  _Novi Grad Youth Shelter._

He wonders why he remembers so little.

There’s no one there now. Stark’s aid efforts have set up better shelters, been building new homes, employed volunteers from the old shelters who can speak any of the myriad languages a Sokovian might call mother-tongue. Pietro walks through empty halls.

In his phone is a list of dates that he and his sister signed into the shelter. The rooms they stayed in, when they left. Pietro remembers… dislike. Having to mark themselves down, where anyone could find them. He continues down the halls, room after room. He searches the one the list says he stayed in, tries to recognise  _something._

Its as he’s lifting the ceiling tile of one room that he finds them: books.

They are  _mother’s_  books, her handwriting, in Hebrew, Sokovian, Russian and Polish, Hungarian edging around Serbian and German and Yiddish. Mother’s books, mother’s knowledge and spells, the books she gave to Wanda.

The name hits him like a punch to the chest.

 

* * *

 

 **xviii.**  
Pietro searches the rest of the rooms they’d stayed in and finds nothing. Then he searches all of the other rooms to make sure.

Then he sits on the floor in the main room with the books. 

With Mama’s spellbooks.

He remembers when she’d first tried to teach them magic, hands dancing and incense smoke, ritual words in a soft voice. Neither of them could do it.

He wonders how long they saved the books. He wonders why they saved them.

 

* * *

 

 **xix.**  
The base is oddly quiet. The others don’t whisper in corners anymore, or maybe he just doesn’t care enough to notice any more.

Stark has no more news on Wanda - Wanda, his sister, he has her  _name_ now. He did not have that this morning.

Pietro sleeps half-curled around his mother’s spellbooks.

 

* * *

 

 **xx.**  
Wanda. The name turned over and over in his mind until it becomes nonsense. Wanda. Wanda. Wandawandawanda Wanda Wanda Wan da Wa nda W a  n   d    a.

Wanda Maximoff, his sister.

He can barely remember her face.

 

* * *

 

 **xxi.**  
He trains with the Captain, with Natasha. Races with Vision and Sam as they fly. He talks to them, shares food with them, is welcomed by them. They sit around the bar and share vodka strong enough it actually does something to his metabolism and the Captain’s.

They are friends.

They are wrong.

 

* * *

 

 **xxii.**  
At night he wracks his brains, trying to understand what is missing.

 

* * *

 

 **xxiii.**  
This he knows: his sister is gone. He doesn’t know where.

This he knows: his parents are dead and have been going on ten years now.

This he knows: his powers are strong, the team are his friends, everyone knows something that he does not.

 

* * *

 

 **xxiv.**  
This he knows: something is wrong.

 

* * *

 

 **xxv.**  
He pores over the books, practices his Hebrew and his Hungarian, his Polish and Russian, backwards and forwards until he can barely function.

He reads mother’s books: a charm for protection, to divine the face of your lover, to call a storm, to heal a great wound. To make sacrifice, to swap one’s wounds for one’s unharmed skin, to make living the dead, to call creatures of the wilds to one’s side.

Spell after spell he could not do.

Spell after spell he tries again, hoping.

 

* * *

 

 **xxvi.**  
“You doing okay, kid?”

Pietro jumps. Clint’s in the doorway, concern etched into his features. Pietro pushes the books underneath the bed.

“Pietro. You doing all right?”

His jaw’s half-locked in shock, he shrugs. “Something’s off,” he manages. “I  _know_  it. I just don’t know  _what.”_

 

* * *

 

 **xxvii.**  
Clint makes him socialise, drags him out to dinner with the team, everyone drinking more than they should. At the end of the evening the only people even vaguely sober are cold-turkey Stark, Mr. Magical Metabolism Rogers and himself.

Stark taps at the screen of his watch, sends off some signal, nods to Pietro. 

“Go home, Roadrunner. We’ll take care of them.”

 

* * *

 

 **xxviii.**  
He doesn’t sleep. He keeps on trying spells.

Levitation, far sight, locator, luck. Languages, binding, unleashing, growth.

None with any result.

Pietro leans forward, over his crossed legs, over the carpet, pressing his brow to the book’s pages.

“Mother,” he whispers. _“Please.”_

A spark shivers on his palm.

 

* * *

 

 **xxix.**  
Wanda trained. Wanda fought. Scarlet shields, scarlet blasts, scarlet tearing apart the toys sent at her. Blood and magic, reality and power, ethereal and physical in one, stronger than mountains and ephemeral as air. It looked like Mother’s magic, was cast by the same movements from her hands. It  _was_  magic, in part, of the same kind as Mother’s, just more instinctual. When she tried Mother’s old spells, now, they worked.

Wanda trained. Wanda fought.

 

* * *

 

 **xxx.**  
Bullets in her brother’s body. Bullets tearing him from her. Bullets in the blood and Wanda called to it - to blood and magic, to the bond strung between them as twins. Wanda pulled the bullets from him to her, shed her blood for his and combed scarlet fingers through her brother’s mind so he might live without her.

 _You **must not tell him** ,_ she sends to the archer.  _Save my body if you must, and bury it. But you must not tell him. If you do, we are all lost._

With her last breath she casts destruction all around her.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxi.**  
With her first breath she chokes.

Pietro’s fist drips blue and silver power, magic burning and desperate in his blood.

Magic awoken by the experiments.

It had taken three spells already to bring him here - one to see if his sister was living or dead, one to locate her body, one to create a portal to an abandoned SHIELD base, an abandoned graveyard.

Pietro had dug up the coffin himself, bare fingers against the dirt.

Wanda’s body was rotting, yes, but even he could see the bullet holes.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxii.**  
Wanda chokes, Wanda gasps, Wanda screams.

Wanda rises in a nimbus of scarlet power, her body still glowing with Pietro’s silver.

She lands. She coughs. She looks up at his face.

“Pietro,” she says. “Pietro, what have you  _done.”_

And Pietro remembers everything.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxiii.**  
The team are shocked, surprised, happy. They welcome her back with open arms.

Something in Pietro seethes.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxiv.**  
“You  _left_ me!” he rages when finally they’re alone. “You tore through my mind, tore my wounds from me and you  _abandoned_  me!”

Wanda looks terribly small, folded on the edge of his bed.

“You could have let me die,” Pietro says. “You  _should_  have let me die.”

 

* * *

 

 **xxxv.**  
He does not see how Wanda’s face falls as he avoids her. He does not let himself care. 

He’s good at that, refusing to let himself. Once, long before, he’d refused to fear his sister, refused to abandon her.

Then, she’d abandoned him.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxvi.**  
He feels her presence at the edge of the group, the looming scarlet mass of her mind. He avoids it. After what she’d done, tearing herself from his mind, tearing his wounds from him, his death, his  _purpose-_

After she’d left him alone, with no memory, no purpose… he will not let her back into his head.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxvii.**  
“Hiding from your sister, Roadrunner?” Stark’s standing by the doorway, hands tucked into suit pockets.

Pietro watches him for a moment before, “After what she did to you, aren’t you?”

Stark walks over, plops himself onto the seat beside him.

“Believe it or not,” Stark says. _“No.”_

Stark’s dressed up smart - by now, all of the team will be. Pietro’s clothes are hanging from the back of the door in a fancy bag.

“The press conference is in fifteen minutes. Now, you and I both know it will take you fifteen  _seconds_  to get your suit on and get over there and that you’re going to wait to the last minute to stress-test the new fabric I designed way sooner than intended but, Pietro?” Stark is looking keenly at him. “Maybe don’t let the press know you hate your sister right now.”

 

* * *

 

 **xxxviii.**  
Stark isn’t defending her. Perhaps that is the only reason he doesn’t throw the suit in the ocean and flee. He arrives five minutes early instead, and hides himself in the back.

 

* * *

 

 **xxxix.**  
“You know she did it to make sure you’d live, right?”

Clint’s voice is calm, steady.

“You know that you  _lied to me.”_

 

* * *

 

 **xl.**  
Wanda doesn’t apologise. Wanda doesn’t try to apologise.

Wanda’s eyes say  _What apology could ever be enough?_

 

* * *

 

 **xli.**  
One night he wakes to see her scarlet eyes.

He skids across the room, out of the room, and is halfway to Canada when Stark and Vision catch him.

“Roadrunner,” Stark says. “If you want to go for a midnight run, maybe put some shoes on first.”

Pietro curls against the tree that’s holding him up. Beneath his feet, blood glistens on the grass.

He says, “I won’t go for midnight runs if you  _keep her away from me.”_

 

* * *

 

 **xlii.**  
“I do not understand,” Vision says. “She watches you and does not talk to you and you ignore her and avoid her.” He rolls his next words around his mouth, pauses before saying, “Before, you did not hesitate with each other.”

Pietro remembers. Remembers how her hands holding his calmed him in the castle, how they turned to each other for advice and protection, for comfort and consideration.

Remembers,  _I’m not leaving you here_  and  _Come back when everyone else is off, not before_  and her scarlet fingers scraping over his mind, tearing his memories apart.

Pietro hunches his shoulders. “You do not know what she can do,” he says. “What she  _has_  done.”

“She wiped your memories of her,” says Vision.

Pietro turns, looks Vision in his unnaturally green eyes. “I trusted her,” he says, “And she destroyed that.”

 

* * *

 

 **xliii.**  
Wanda stays at the edges. She dares not step closer. She could, she could, and the team would welcome her in, make a space for her. Already Vision smiles at her in the corridors, the Captain and Widow nod. Clint brings her a mug of coffee from the bar and sits beside her, unflinching.

They come to her, and she is careful not to push them away.

She doesn’t want them, though. What she wants, what she needs, the torn and tattered bond to her brother, is something she may never have back.

 

* * *

 

 **xliv.**  
“You tried talking to him?” Clint asks. He’s found her latest hiding place - the roof, scattering seed for the birds. He stands in the shade by the door and watches. 

“I can’t,” she says. “I cannot insult him like that.”

“Isn’t an insult if it’s an apology.”

Wanda huffs a laugh, an exhale of breath out her nose, a slight jolt to her shoulders. Even with her brother’s glittering blue magic she can still feel the scars of the bullets she took from him. “I could apologise,” she acknowledges. “But it would mean nothing. For me to do what I did to him, after all we shared, all we knew... There is no apology that could ever be enough.”

 

* * *

 

 **xlv.**  
It’s killing her though, slowly and surely. She and Pietro relied on each other, had grown around each other. In her last moments she’d made a scaffold to give Pietro strength, to make him last, to help him support himself.

She has no such thing to help her.

It is ironic, she thinks. The one thing that saved Pietro’s life was to tear her from his memory. The thing that will kill her a second time is that she did so.

 

* * *

 

 **xlvi.**  
He runs from her. He avoids her in the day, yes, but the one time she drew close, sensing a nightmare in his mind even though she tries not to look, dares not touch, he woke and he  _ran_  from her.

When he stumbled back in his feet were covered in blood.

He fears her. He fears her as everyone has always feared her. Mama had looked at her anger and worried for her, feared for her future. In the children’s home the other children had feared her, her rage, her drive, Pietro at her side like a guard. The kids on the street had feared her rage, had respected her knowledge, had called her witch. The soldiers had feared her powers, List and Strucker her potential, the Avengers had feared her -  _do_ fear her - and now...

Pietro never feared her before. Had never let himself, had chosen to refuse to feel fear in the face of all she could do. Had been the one person unflinchingly honest, never letting fear catch his tongue.

Now he runs from her. Now he avoids her. 

Now, when she tries to soothe his nightmares, his heart is going so fast that Stark’s readout says “heartrate critical” when Pietro screams at them to keep her away from him.

Now, Stark is no longer his nightmare.

She is.

 

* * *

 

 **xlvii.**  
“You died for him,” Vision says. She hadn’t heard the door open, but maybe it hadn’t at all. He can phase through walls after all, can fly without effort. He settles on the edge of the roof beside her. “I don’t understand why he hates that.”

Wanda smiles at him, small and gentle. “It’s not that,” Wanda says. “It’s a matter of trust.”

“You took his memories from him,” Vision says. “To save his life.”

Wanda stares at the horizon, kicks her heels against the concrete, taps her fingers against the very edge of the building. 

“Would he have done the same, in your position?”

 

* * *

 

 **xlviii.**  
He’s eating less and less, sleeping barely at all. He’s only in the base when she isn’t - she goes off for some training exercise he returns to sleep and grab a shower. She returns and he goes for a run, or for a training exercise of his own.

This dance goes perfectly until one day he’s at the Bartons and Lila asks about his sister.

Pietro’s over the horizon in a heartbeat.

 

* * *

 

 **xlix.**  
“What happened?” asks Laura down the phoneline. Clint had called first, Lila sniffling and tearful in the background, but he’d passed the phone to Laura within two sentences. “I don’t know what happened, Lila’s incredibly worried she’s said something awful and that you’re never coming back and she won’t say a peep to us. What happened, Pietro?”

Pietro leans against a tree, feels the bark press into his forehead. His throat feels like lead, his stomach like some horrible void, his hands are still trembling even where they hold the phone to his ear. 

“Ha-,” he starts, but he can’t make himself finish. He sighs, swallows, tries again. “Laura,” he asks, sounds out the familiar word, lets his mouth find itself again. “Has my sister been visiting you?”

 

* * *

 

 **l.**  
Laura yells at Clint for the first time Pietro’s ever heard, a blistering outpouring of protectiveness he thought she reserved only for her own children, her own husband. Clint, cowed, heads out with a Quinjet to pick him up. While he waits, he sits at the base of a tree, and stays on the line with Lila.

“‘m sorry,” she mumbles as soon as she’s passed the phone. “I didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have just run.”

“Is she really that horrible?”

Pietro picks at the grass around him, tears up blades of it and scatters them around him. “I don’t know,” he says. “She wasn’t before. But-” and his throat is closing up, is filled with lead and dread and he can’t make himself speak until he takes ten deep breaths. “What she did,” he says. “I can’t-”

“Is it like...” Lila says, trying to fill the gaps for him. “Like when Coop and I fight. And we hit each other and we get bruises and cuts and Mom tells us off but we had fun and it helped so it doesn’t matter. But if I tried to actually hurt Coop, like  _really_ hurt him, like  _kill_  him hurt him. That isn’t fun and that isn’t okay.”

Pietro laughs, tilts his head back against the tree and laughs. “Yeah,” he says, “Like that. You trust Cooper and he isn’t going to hurt you. And Cooper trusts you and you aren’t going to hurt him. But if you then  _did_  hurt him-”

“He would  _hate_  me,” Lila says. “Like you hate her.”

They fall silent for a while, a peaceful quiet, and Pietro can hear at the other end of the line - Cooper playing with Nate while Laura rattles around the kitchen, taking out her protectiveness on unarmed kitchen utensils. 

“Are you okay?” Lila asks after a while. 

“No,” Pietro says. “I don’t think so. But I’m getting better.”

He can hear the smile in Lila’s voice as she says, “You’re lying.”

“Maybe,” he says, but he’s smiling now too. “What do you want to do when I get back?”

They’re discussing plans to build a proper tree-house when the Quinjet eventually lands, and Pietro’s heartrate is finally back to normal.

 

* * *

 

 **li.**  
“You’re one of the family,” Laura says once he gets in and she’s given him a hug. “Of course I’m protective of you.”

Pietro can’t help the shaky smile he gives at that.

 

* * *

 

 **lii.**  
They don’t put the twins on missions together. Even if it’s an emergency they keep one back, keep one in reserve, and pile everyone else in instead.

This is why Pietro feels absolute shock when he sees what is unmistakably Wanda’s scarlet at his back. He spins, runs backwards, sees his sister standing between buildings, a vast scarlet shield holding back bullets meant for him.

“Run!” she yells in Sokovian, “Get out of here!”

And then the shield falls.

 

* * *

 

 **liii.**  
Pietro wakes dripping in sweat, his heart as fast as a hummingbird’s.

He’s at the base. He’s at the base, and in his room, and he can’t see Wanda’s scarlet anywhere, can’t feel her mind anywhere nearby.

The final image of his dream dances before his eyes.

Wanda, going down in a hail of bullets.

 

* * *

 

 **liv.**  
He dreads seeing her, fears the slightest spot of scarlet in the halls, avoids her still.

His heart races as soon as he senses her mind growing near, as soon as he hears her voice over comms.

He wonders how he hid this fear all those years, how he could possibly have refused to fear her at all, when he fears her this much.

 

* * *

 

 **lv.**  
He sees her face, glimpses it through a window as he’s running and he’s bowled over by the fear and the relief he feels.

It  _was_  a dream, she  _isn’t_  dead.

She  _isn’t dead_. She can  _still hurt him_.

He stays in the fallen sprawl he came to rest in and waits for his pulse to slow before he makes his way into medical.

 

* * *

 

 **lvi.**  
Doctor Cho clucks at him as she patches him up. “You are not doing yourself any favours,” she says. “Are you sleeping enough? Eating enough?” She pokes his ribs, shines a light in his eyes. “You do not look well.”

Pietro doesn’t know how he looks. It’s not like he checks a mirror every day. He knows he feels tired and that he rarely has any appetite and that his sleep has been messed up beyond belief and littered with nightmares.

“Your heartrate is worrying,” she says. “And you’re shaking, did you realise?”

Oh. He hadn’t.

 

* * *

 

 **lvii.**  
More nightmares. Nightmares of Wanda stepping into bullets in his place, memories of the bullets digging into him, the terrifying blinding moment as Wanda’s scarlet fingers had scraped through his mind and locked his memories of her away. Nightmares of Wanda dying - in Novi Grad, in the base, halfway around the world - and being torn between relief and dread each time.

It’s worse when he wakes and he spots her around the base.

 

* * *

 

 **lviii.**  
Wanda uses scarlet to sleep, to wake, to survive around base. She avoids Pietro now, as much as he avoids her, stays out of his way if only to ease his worry after Clint told her what happened at the farm.

She’s tired and she’s worried: not seeing Pietro, not being able to glance and know in a moment how he’s doing is nerve-wracking for her, but after what she’s done she isn’t going to make things worse for him, not if she can help it.

She’s committed one crime against him, against all that they ever were. She won’t do so again.

 

* * *

 

 **lix.**  
She stops visiting the Bartons. Pietro needs a safe space to call his own and if the base can’t be that for him any more then she cannot begrudge him the Bartons freely-given hospitality. She stays in her room, or she sits with Vision and reads, stays out of the way of the paths her brother walks.

There is a gulf between them, unbridged, and she thinks there is no hope of it ever being repaired.

 

* * *

 

 **lx.**  
He sees her leaving her room and the fear-relief hits him again. He stumbles to a halt, his blue fading out behind him.

For a long moment they stare at each other in silence.

He wants to ask  _Why did you do it?_  but he knows why. He wants to ask  _How could you do that to me?_  but he knows that too. He wants to ask  _Are you ever going to even try to apologise?_  but he can’t unstick his tongue. He can hear his heartbeat racing like a hummingbird’s.

Wanda looks at him, a deer in the headlights. Her mouth is slightly open - shock or about to speak, he doesn’t know, until she eventually licks her lips, closes wet eyes.

“I don’t know what to say,” she says. “I could apologise, but it would be meaningless. I would save you anyway I could all over again. I would apologise as best I can, but-”

Pietro manages, just, to unstick his tongue. “If you touch my mind,” he says. “I’ll kill you.”

Wanda nods, blinks. As she walks away Pietro sees the glimmer of tears on her cheeks.

 

* * *

 

 **lxi.**  
He can see her and it doesn’t kill him. He can speak to her, even if he feels like he’s going to lose what little lunch he had. 

He’d wanted to know what happened to his sister. Wanted to see her and speak to her, to know that she was well.

He’d wanted the world to feel right again, to stop feeling off balance, but now, knowing everything, it only feels worse.

 

* * *

 

 **lxii.**  
This he knows: nothing was ever truly right.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave comments!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Off Kilter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13172835) by [EssayOfThoughts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts)
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